Vietnamese Language Research Articles

Analysis of Translation Trends of the Modal Verb “Can” and Its Alternatives in Vietnamese Based on Corpus-Based Study

As the author has observed, "can" and its English alternative modal verbs like "could", "may" or "might" are usually translated into Vietnamese under a general word: "có thể". However, those words do express not only the subject's ability or probability of happening of an event but also other meanings such as permission or general characteristics (Thomson and Martinet, 1986; Alexander, 1990; Eastwood, 1994). The question is that how we can grasp the tendencies of translating the modal verb "can" and its alternatives in specific situations into Vietnamese and vice versa without causing ambiguities or negative effects on target readers. Hence, the author decided to conduct the research with translation data which is combined from the source of 30 popular English books and their translation versions in the Vietnamese language, making a set of about 40,000 pairs of sentences to investigate how the modal verb "can" and other modal verbs are translated in Vietnamese with some basic statistics analyzed together with their pictorial graphs in order to highlight those translation trends.

Meronymy of Words Expressing Sweet Potato Plant Parts in Vietnamese and Lao Languages

Meronymy of Words Expressing Sweet Potato Plant Parts in Vietnamese and Lao Languages

중국의 동아시아 한자어 연구 동향 분석- CNKI 학술지 데이터를 중심으로

In this article, We analyzed the research trends of East Asian Sino words in China, based on the articles of the CNKI data. We collected 2,436 articles dealing with Sino words in Korean, Chinese, Japanese and Vietnamese languages using 44 keywords which related to East Asian sino words such as ‘HANZICI(漢字詞)’, ‘HANYUCI(漢語詞)’ ect. We obtained a list of 1543 papers by deleting the duplicated lists. Finally, the list of 983 analysis targets was confirmed by confirming whether it met the scope of this study. We analyzed the research topics, objects, scope, periods, and methods, through the titles, keywords, abstracts, and text. As a result of the analysis, the most studies were related to the homographs in Chinese and Japanese, Japanese loanwords in Chinese, and the formation modern Chinese vocabulary, followed by studies related to homographs in Korean and Chinese characters, especially for education. The research of Vietnamese Sino words had the least proportion and lacked of diversity.

학교급별 베트남어 능력 평가지표 및 출제지침 구축에 관한 연구

Recently the demand for learning Vietnamese is rapidly increasing for reasons such as employment and local dispatch. However, there are very limited ways to access Vietnamese language learning in Korea. Fortunately as Vietnamese was adopted for the first time in the 2015 College Scholastic Ability Test. Since then, the second foreign language curriculum revised in 2015 by the Ministry of Education has been reflected in the middle school and high school Vietnamese curriculum. Currently NIIED and the Incheon Metropolitan Office of Education etc have carried out a project to develop Vietnamese elementary middle and high school textbooks. However there are no studies on systematic evaluation criteria that can guarantee the continuity and reliability of Vietnamese education. Therefore this study aims to contribute to the completion of the curriculum of education evaluation feedback and recording by regulating the evaluation standards that can be applied in the educational field.

Information Extraction from Invoices by using a Graph Convolutional Neural Network: A Case Study of Vietnamese Stores

Information extraction automatically obtains structured information from unstructured or semi-structured machine-readable documents. The extraction steps consist mainly of classifying words (tagging). The output can be stored as key-value pairs in a computer-friendly file format, and then stored in a database for later reference. Information extraction from receipts or invoices is a difficult task because the tagging step should not be done solely on machine-readable words. Also, we obtain layout information or positions of words relative to other words in the invoices or receipts. This study deployed optical character recognition solutions for the Vietnamese language (VietOCR) combining a graph convolutional network (GCN) to extract information from 731 Vietnamese invoices issued by several stores. First, we collected invoice images captured with smartphones from supermarkets in Vietnam. Then, with those images we proceeded with text detection and recognition, then feature processing. The dataset was classified into two parts for training and testing, and we executed classification tasks with two GCNs. Experimental results revealed that our proposed method reached 99.50%, 98.52%, 98.52%, and 98.52% for accuracy, recall, precision, and F1-score, respectively. This work is expected to prove useful for information extraction from image-based documents.

An Academic-Community Engagement: A Roadmap for Developing a Culturally Relevant Diabetes Self-Management Program among Vietnamese Americans

Recognizing and addressing culture-specific differences concerning diabetes self-management education and support (DSMES) programs can potentially increase participation among Vietnamese Americans with type 2 diabetes and improve health outcomes. This paper describes the academic-community engagement process used to seek input from the Vietnamese community of Oklahoma to tailor a DSMES program. The Community Engagement Continuum (CEC) (CDC, 2011) was utilized as a conceptual framework to engage with the Vietnamese community. The academic team assembled a community advisory board (CAB) of stakeholders, who were selected to advise the team on intervention development; elicited community feedback; and integrated recommendations to tailor the DSMES program. Twenty-three CAB members participated in a minimum of three community engagement meetings over six months. Meetings were structured to elicit feedback and suggestions to ensure that the tailored program was embedded in Vietnamese cultural practices and accounted for community resources and needs. CAB members identified that education and resources must be provided in the Vietnamese language with special attention to culturally relevant adaptations concerning healthy eating and medication adherence. Application of the CEC framework facilitated the inclusion of Vietnamese community perspectives and beliefs, the identification of potential collaborators, the establishment of trust and relationships, and the development of a culturally relevant DSMES program. This engagement process may serve as a model for other underserved minority populations to develop culturally appropriate health promotion and disease prevention interventions.

Attracting international students to a developing Asian country: Push–pull factors for a niche market, the case of a Vietnamese higher education institution

Student mobility has become a global phenomenon with an upward trend in the past two decades, and Asian countries are becoming important receiving countries. Such phenomenon has been increasingly investigated producing a growing body of literature on Asia-bound international student mobility. However, while some countries stand in the spotlight of international student scholarship, other lesser known destinations remain underrepresented. This article provides an exploratory effort to examine factors that attract international students to Vietnam, a country which has not been visible on international student mobility landscape as a receiving destination. The study employs push–pull factors framework and a mixed methods approach combining qualitative and quantitative methods (n = 94) to examine the push–pull factors that influence the decision of international students to choose Vietnam as the destination country and a Vietnamese higher education institution as host institution. Research findings show that major push factors include aspirations for new experiences, home country economic outlook and pessimistic job prospects at home. Regarding pull factors, at national level, bright economic prospect is the top pull factor attracting international students to a developing country like Vietnam, and at institutional level, the university’s reputation and its Vietnamese Studies and language programmes are the most important pull factors attracting international students to the university to study. Based on the research results, recommendations are proposed for higher education institutions in Vietnam and other developing Asian countries to attract international students with implications against the context of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

Students' attitudes towards teacher's use of Vietnamese in EFL classrooms at Vietnam National University Hanoi, International School

The role of L1 in L2 classrooms has without any doubt been the hot topic of debates and discussions. In particular, some linguists and educators do not support the use of L1 in teaching L2, whereas others emphasize the importance of L1 in L2 classes. Although studies have been done on both teachers’ and students’ attitudes toward L1 use in the L2 classroom, it still remains the question of when and how L1 can become an effective supporting tool for L2. The goal of this research is to present the results on the functionality of L1 (Vietnamese language) in L2 (EFL) classrooms under students’ perspectives. A survey questionnaire was designed to deliver to participants for the study: 126 students at the intermediate level of the General English program at Vietnam National University Hanoi, International School (VNU-IS). The study's findings indicated that the VNU-IS student participants were satisfied with their teacher’s use of L1. L1 usage was also discovered to be preferred for the following purposes: language functionality, managerial functionality, effective functionality, and social functionality. Among them, language functionality is most favored by VNU-IS students. The results also revealed that Vietnamese should be considered as a backup rather than a barrier for Vietnamese teachers.

“The Vietnamese language for beginners”. A new textbook: traditions and innovations

The article presents a new textbook of the Vietnamese language for beginners, published in MSLU ("Vietnamese language for beginners: a textbook." In 3 parts). It meets the new requirements that the fundamental changes taking place in Vietnam, Russia and around the world put before teachers of the Vietnamese language. The article reveals the structure of the textbook and the basic principles of teaching on it.

New Vietnamese Corpus for Machine Reading Comprehension of Health News Articles

Machine reading comprehension is a natural language understanding task where the computing system is required to read a text and then find the answer to a specific question posed by a human. Large-scale and high-quality corpora are necessary for evaluating machine reading comprehension models. Furthermore, machine reading comprehension (MRC) for the health sector has potential for practical applications; nevertheless, MRC research in this domain is currently scarce. This article presents UIT-ViNewsQA, a new corpus for the Vietnamese language to evaluate MRC models for the healthcare textual domain. The corpus consists of 22,057 human-generated question-answer pairs. Crowd-workers create the questions and answers on a collection of 4,416 online Vietnamese healthcare news articles, where the answers are textual spans extracted from the corresponding articles. We introduce a process for creating a high-quality corpus for the Vietnamese machine reading comprehension task. Linguistically, our corpus accommodates diversity in question and answer types. In addition, we conduct experiments and compare the effectiveness of different MRC methods based on the neural networks and transformer architectures. Experimental results on our corpus show that the MRC system based on ALBERT architecture outperforms the neural network architectures and the BERT-based approach, an exact match score of 65.26% and an F1-score of 84.89%. The best machine model achieves about 10.90% F1-score less efficiently than humans, which proves that exploring machine models on UIT-ViNewsQA to surpass humans is challenging for researchers in the future. Our corpus is publicly available on our website: http://nlp.uit.edu.vn/datasets for research purposes.

Constructing Vietnamese WordNet: A Case Study

WordNets are commonly used in tasks such as summarizing documents, extracting information, translating and creating other lexical resources. This paper presents experiments in constructing a Vietnamese WordNet (VWN) from a variety of freely published resources in several languages. The VWN has the same structure as the Princeton WordNet. Our algorithm translates several existing WordNets to Vietnamese using a freely available machine translator, removes translation ambiguities by applying ranking methods based on occurrence counts and Google distances on translation candidates. We also establish connections between synsets and extract glosses for synsets. Finally, we carefully look at the VWN created and identify problematic issues in the VWN due to differences in culture and agglutinative morphology of Vietnamese and other languages used.

A Feature-Rich Vietnamese Named Entity Recognition Model

In this paper, we present a feature-based named entity recognition (NER) model that achieves the start-of-the-art accuracy for Vietnamese language. We combine word, word-shape features, PoS, chunk, Brown-cluster-based features, and word-embedding-based features in the Conditional Random Fields (CRF) model. We also explore the effects of word segmentation, PoS tagging, and chunking results of many popular Vietnamese NLP toolkits on the accuracy of the proposed feature-based NER model. Up to now, our work is the first work that systematically performs an extrinsic evaluation of basic Vietnamese NLP toolkits on the downstream NER task. Experimental results show that while automatically-generated word segmentation is useful, PoS and chunking information generated by Vietnamese NLP tools does not show their benefits for the proposed feature-based NER model.

In memory of Professor Pierluigi Cecchi.

In memory of Professor Pierluigi Cecchi.

Semantic and Functional Potential of the Particle ALREADY and its Reflection in Translation into Vietnamese (Based on the Material of the Novel by M. A. Bulgakov "The Master and Margarita")

The article discusses typical semantic and pragmatic implementations of the particle "already" and the means of the Vietnamese language used in practice to convey the corresponding meanings. The relevance of the research is determined by its involvement in the problems of translating Russian particles as communicative and pragmatic signs into foreign languages. The object of the study is the particle "already". The subject of the research is syntagmatic, semantic and pragmatic features of this lexeme, as well as ways and means of translating statements from "already" into Vietnamese. The research material was M. A. Bulgakov's novel "The Master and Margarita" and the text of its translation into Vietnamese. The purpose of the work is to establish the range of types of use of the particle "already" presented in the text of the work under consideration, as well as to determine the features of ways to translate statements with this particle into Vietnamese. The paper uses a descriptive method, as well as elements of comparative and quantitative analysis. The novelty of the study is determined by the fact that for the first time the question of the functioning of the particle "already" and its Vietnamese analogues is considered on the material of the named novel by M. A. Bulgakov. It is established that when translating statements with the particle "already", a number of relevant Vietnamese words and service combinations are used, of which the most popular means of direct translation is đã, with non-predicative components, transmitting an assessment according to the parameters ‘much’, ‘little’, ‘long’, ‘late’, and with predicative components, the values are ‘change in the situation’, ‘expectation’ and ‘earlier than expected'. It is shown that the specifics of the semantic and functional capabilities of the Russian "already" and the service units of the Vietnamese language do not always allow for an adequate translation, and therefore they cannot be considered completely equivalent. The results of the study can be taken into account both in the study of other Russian particles, including in the comparative aspect, and in lexicographic practice.

How to generate Muong speech directly from Vietnamese text: Cross-lingual speech synthesis for close language pair

The paper introduces a method for automatic translation of Vietnamese text into Muong speech in two dialects, Muong Bi - Hoa Binh and Muong Tan Son - Phu Tho, which are all unwritten dialects of the Muong language. Due to the very close relationship between the Vietnamese and Muong languages, the translation system was built to look like a cross-lingual speech synthesis system, in which the input is the text of one language (i.e., the Vietnamese) and the output is the speech of another language (i.e., the two Muong dialects). The system used the modern sequence-to-sequence TTS neural models Tacotron2 and WaveGlow. The evaluation results showed a high quality of translation (with a fluency score of 4.61/5.0 and an adequacy score of 4.79/5.0) and also synthesized speech quality (with naturalness on the MOS scale of 4.68/5.0 and intelligibility of 94.60%). The received results show that the applicability of the proposed system to other minority languages is promising, especially in the case of unwritten languages.

Combining Specialized Word Embeddings and Subword Semantic Features for Lexical Entailment Recognition

The challenge of Lexical Entailment Recognition (LER) aims to identify the is-a relation between words. This problem has recently received attention from researchers in the field of natural language processing because of its application to varied downstream tasks. However, almost all prior studies have only focused on datasets that include single words; thus, how to handle compound words effectively is still a challenge. In this study, we propose a novel method called LERC (Lexical Entailment Recognition Combination) to solve this problem by combining embedding representations and subword semantic features. For this aim, firstly a specialized word embedding model for the LER tasks is trained. Secondly, subword semantic information of word pairs is exploited to compute another feature vector. This feature vector is combined with embedding vectors for supervised classification. We considered three LER tasks, including Lexical Entailment Detection, Lexical Entailment Directionality, and Lexical Entailment Determination. Experimental results conducted on several benchmark datasets in English and Vietnamese languages demonstrated that the subword semantic feature is useful for these tasks. Moreover, LERC outperformed several methods published recently.

Catholicism and the Development of the Vietnamese Alphabet, 1620–1898

This paper analyzes the Catholic contributions to the development of the Vietnamese alphabet—quốc ngữ, or the “national script”—during its first 250 years of existence, before it was popularized outside of Catholic circles. In particular, the article traces the evolution of quốc ngữ spelling in the writings and publications of European Catholic missionaries and Vietnamese catechists and priests from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. These texts include the dictionaries and descriptions of the Vietnamese language by Alexandre de Rhodes (1651) and Jean-Louis Tabert (1838), as well as lesser-known quốc ngữ writings before the twentieth century. Since the Vietnamese alphabet began as a transcription of spoken Vietnamese, its changing orthography also reflects changes in Vietnamese pronunciation.

Type 2 diabetes and hypertension in Vietnam: a systematic review and meta-analysis of studies between 2000 and 2020

ObjectivesThe objective of this study was to determine the level of type 2 diabetes (T2DM) and hypertension (HTN) in Vietnam and to assess the trend and recommend the future direction...

Euphemia as a linguocultural phenomenon of the Vietnamese language

The article analyzes euphemia as a linguocultural phenomenon in the Vietnamese language. It examines the interrelationship between euphemisms and taboos. The author distinguishes five functional types of euphemisms. They are: euphemisms-word taboos used to avoid names of frightful things and phenomena; euphemisms to substitute something obscene, indecent, unpleasant; etiquette euphemisms; political euphemisms; puns (wordplay) for an intended humorous effect. There are the following large fields of euphemisms: everyday-spoken and socio-political. There have been determined euphemism formation modes which are divided into two large categories: structural (formal) and lexico-semantic ones. The article analyzes different euphemism formation modes. In the course of the study, the author has used a broad illustrative material. The research work relevance is due to the widespread usage of euphemisms in the media and communication.

Integrating Culture in Foreign Language Teaching: Case of Teaching Vietnamese for Foreigners in Vietnam

Cultural integration in foreign language teaching is one of the ways to help learners develop language competence. In foreign language teaching, there have been many successful models of cultural integration. Vietnamese is also a foreign language of interest in some countries. In Vietnam, a cultural integration model in teaching Vietnamese to foreigners has been initially implemented with good results. The program was based on a number of culturally integrated teaching models to help foreigners learn Vietnamese effectively, including such elements as cultural experience (learning to sing folk songs and taking part in plays), and using literary texts (songs, proverbs). The purpose of this article is to report on a study of the effectiveness of this cultural integration program teaching Vietnamese to overseas students at the Thai Nguyen University of Education. The study involved scrutiny of documents, curricula and teaching methods, along with a survey of international students’ perceptions of three particular aspects of the program focused on cultural integration. The study also sought to gauge whether the Vietnamese language ability of the international student learners had been improved by engagement in the new program in comparison with student performance from the previous year. While such improvement was evident, the study offers suggestions for further improvement of the program.
 
 Received: 29 April 2022 / Accepted: 30 June 2022 / Published: 5 July 2022